Most of the current schemes looking at hydrogen as a fuel are based on fuel cells - very different to running hydrogen in an ic engine.

WHY I don't know - the internal combustion engine as been refined over 100 years and is at a very high peak - it does NOT need replacing.

As to hydrogen being difficult to handle not really any more so than LPG.

BP has been offering liquid hydrogen at a select number of filling stations for a while now.

Yes hydrogen is expensive to produce from water but what an ideal way to use up the electricity generated by nuke power stations at night - using surplus electric to make a fuel that does not pollute and we can still use our outboards - sounds like heaven!!!

As to the current oil prices they are more down to political shit than anything else - the Russians aren't helping either.

I don't want more nuclear power stations, there are two up here and several being decommisioned that never supplied any power to Scotland in the first place!
Wind power is the latest craze, there are fights all over the place for enormous winds farms up and down the West coast at the moment. None of which are required for the area and are to export power siouth to make Scottish Power more money, not a good enough reason to spoil the last wildernesses in the country!
BTW Wind power is pretty poor for power generation anyway, it only works in combination with storage or other mediums. It is not the "answer" to normal power generation.
For the most environmentally friendly option that actually works subsurface tidal generation combined with pumped storage schemes is probably the answer. Unfortunately this is the most expensive to build and maintain which is why is has not been tried on a large scale yet. The good thing about tides is they are reliable and the energy can be stored in the pumped storage.
Oil will not run out in my lifetime but it will probably get very expensive as reserves get more expensive to extract.

I don't want more nuclear power stations, there are two up here and several being decommisioned that never supplied any power to Scotland in the first place!
Wind power is the latest craze, there are fights all over the place for enormous winds farms up and down the West coast at the moment. None of which are required for the area and are to export power siouth to make Scottish Power more money, not a good enough reason to spoil the last wildernesses in the country!

TOTALLY wrong reasons I am afraid - smacks of being a NIMBY!

Nuclear power stations make less of an impact on the local environment thany ANY other form of power - at Traswfynydd it was actually quite hard to find the nuclear powerstation - Drax on the other hand is a blot on the landscape visable for miles.

There are very good reasons why Scotland was chosen for nuclear power - granite is very stable - not many earthquakes in Scotland - and plenty of water for cooling.

Also people whinge about having a nuke powerstation near them so a wilderness is much better. Makes me laugh when they French have so many just 30 miles away from the south coast!

Totally agree with you about wind power - Wales is also being targetted by these bloody things - we don't have much countryside left - why destroy it? Really annoys me that people like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are quite prepared to allow the Brecon Beacons to be covered in these monsters.

Offshore sounds great - till you realise that they want to put them on sandbanks 2 miles out - that is NOT offshore - the things are bigger than the London Eye - will be visable for miles! Just wait until an oil carrier hits one in the Bristol channel - great for the environment!

I didn't say I didn't want renewable, SUBSURFACE tidal and pumped storage are both clean and renewable sources. They are just expensive to build and in the case of tide power, maintain.
Scotland has twice the generating capacity it uses and is already home to many water power schemes. The latest schemes envisage putting huge windfarms up all over the country that are not required for local generation.
I do think that any pollution causing or unsightly power generators should be placed close to where power is needed and not shunted off somewhere where there are not enough folk to object. Not a NIMBY attitude at all, if the wind turbines were needed for here I would be the last to object. What I do object to is that hundreds of turbines are planned for here to supply England with power simply because there are tax breaks to build them. There have been some wind turbines started to be instaled on the western isles recently, nobody including the islanders objected to them as they supplied local needs. However there are now plans to set up windfarms of 200-400 huge turbines on some exposed areas. They are being fought by everyone!
The sorry thing is that wind power is a poor system that is fairly inefficient.
The two nuclear power stations in Scotland could be switched off tomorrow and the only folk that would notice is Scottish power shareholders and Birmingham, nobody would see any difference here as they are completely surplus local capacity, so why are they here and not south. (neither is built on granite, they are both on raised beaches on either side of the country. They are also sea water cooled, something that is not in short supply in points south)
Fusion is also at least 30 years away with no guarantee it will work. The 3 milion degree operation temperatures and the intial power surge to start it are beyond current technologies. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't.
The fact that nuclear power stations don't LOOK like they are making a difference is not proof that they aren't. The radionuclides that are and have been released into the sea and contaminate the seabed around them are far worse than most folk suspect. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.
BTW my degree took in renewables so I am relatively informed and not just talking out of my a**.

No idea what the maximum size is but it is complicated by the fact that in high winds they de clutch to stop damage to the turbine.
The problem with wind power is that they are only able to provide power 30% of the total time. they have to be used in conjunction with other means like natural gas stations to get 100% availability.

The 'Offshore' windfarm that they are proposing off Blackpool (4 nm from the end of Central Pier) has got 90 turbines, each the height of Blackpool Tower, with a turbine span similar to that of a Boeing 747!!

Apparently they are going to be an 'interesting addition to the Blackpool Seascape'. Hmmmmm....we'll see........